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You don’t have to tell gardeners about the attributes of plants. They already know they can be beautiful, useful, fragrant, tasty, cooling and more.

But how many of us would describe them as powerful, unless you've had one topple over on your home?

Bryce Lane experienced that kind of plant power in 2004 when Hurricane Frances felled the huge oak tree shading most of his garden in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“It went from full shade to full sun overnight,” said Bryce, a retired lecturer emeritus with the Department of Horticultural Sciences at North Carolina State University.

In a recent presentation to members of the Mid-South Hydrangea Society, Lane explored the topic: “The Joy of Gardening: The Power of Plants to Change Your Point of View.”

Every natural disaster, he said, presents new gardening opportunities. He is now enjoying many flowering plants and shrubs that needed more sunlight to thrive than he had BHF (Before Hurricane Frances).

Power was also stored in a tiny acorn dropped by the felled tree. After it cozied itself into some receptive soil, it began growing and now towers high above garden on its way to replacing its parent.

The natural power embedded in the DNA of ancient and rare bristlecone pines allows them to live 5,000 years or more. Lane has made two trips to a high altitude desert in northern California to observe and photograph these not exactly gorgeous trees that get just 4 to 6 inches of rain per year.

“They are the oldest living things on earth,” he said. “They can survive because the tree allows parts of itself to die so the whole can live.”

When he’s stuck in traffic he thinks about the tenacity and adaptability of those trees.

It took a trip to Monet’s garden at Giverny, France, to spark his interest in art.

“I didn’t care much about art until I saw what he saw when he painted.”

He was awestruck at other European locations as well including cemeteries where flowers and other forms of horticulture are planted on almost every grave and in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial overlooking Omaha Beach where no blade of grass is ever allowed to touch one of the almost 9,400 headstones.

“If a blade gets near a headstone, it is clipped off by hand, never with a WeedEater,” said Bryce, who described it as the practice as the “ultimate in turf maintenance.”

On a visit to the Chatsworth Estate in England he had just stepped up on a low stone wall surrounding a garden to get a good angle for his photograph when an elderly gardener approached him.

“I thought he was going to make me get down but he just wanted to tell me about a better place to shoot on a small hill,” he said.

The gardener, he learned, was 86 years old and had been working at Chatsworth since he was 16.

That meeting completely changed his mind about the notion that changing jobs often was necessary for career success.

He ended up teaching at NCSU for 32 years, which allowed him and his wife, Sue, to live and garden on the same property for 33 years.

Although now retired, Lane still teaches at NCSU and continues to host his two-time Emmy-winning weekly gardening television show, “In the Garden with Bryce Lane.”

“Experiences in a garden can lift our spirits, nourish our souls, relax and invigorate us and change our perspectives.”

Subhead

Instead of having three meetings with great speakers along with a garden tour and plant sale, the society will focus entirely on a two-day symposium featuring lectures by the dean of American horticulture, Dr. Michael Dirr, and other luminaries as well as a garden tour and plant sale. It will all take place on June 11-12 at Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

Also on the symposium program will be Mal Condon, a former hydrangea nursery owner who is now curator of expanding hydrangea collection at Heritage Museums & Gardens on Cape Cod, and Natalia Hamill, brand manager at Bailey Nurseries, the company that introduced Endless Summer and several other re-blooming hydrangeas to gardeners.

Brown said the cost of the symposium has not been determined but it will be “affordable.”